In a career lasting three quarters of a century, Dame Angela Lansbury won high praise and prizes in cinema, theatre and TV, and became a member of the acting aristocracy in three countries – Britain, where she was born; America, her home for most of her life; and Ireland, where she kept a house for many decades.
Her movie career stretched from Gaslight in 1944 to the 2018 children’s films, Buttons and Mary Poppins Returns. She went from youthful prodigy – with two Oscar nominations by the age of 21 – to cinematic grande dame: in 2014, as her 90th birthday approached, she received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar.
She also managed a long theatrical career, despite not making her Broadway musical debut until her 40s. She became one of the first ladies of American musical theatre, working frequently with her near-contemporary Stephen Sondheim, the Broadway genius of the era. She won five Tony awards, and continued to appear on Broadway and in the London West End until her 10th decade.
Lansbury’s impressive 12-year run on the crime drama Murder, She Wrote also feels even more sustained than it was, since the 264 episodes have remained almost permanently on screen in re-runs in the US, UK and around the world.
She was born in the Regent’s Park area of London in 1925, the daughter of Northern Irish actor Moyna Macgill and Edgar Lansbury, a socialist politician who was a councillor and mayor in the east London district of Poplar.
Her paternal grandfather was even more prominent in leftwing politics – George Lansbury, leader of the Labour party from 1932 to 1935 – and, even after emigrating to America, his granddaughter maintained a fascination with British politics, quizzing English interviewers about the merits of Wilson, Kinnock, Blair, and, later, Corbyn.
That interest was a homage to her father, who died when she was only nine. This blight on her childhood was ameliorated by appearances in school plays, then tuition at dance and drama schools.
The sense that she found in acting an escape from pain was confirmed when she was asked, in a 90th birthday interview, what advice she would give to young performers. Contradicting the common training of actors to channel their own emotional history into roles, she counselled: “Leave who you are at home ... all that daily stuff. If I allow my experiences to encroach on the character’s life and experience, I’m putting a stumbling block that will prevent me from becoming someone totally different from the person that I am.”
In her childhood, acting had also been more literally a liberation, when the Nazi bombing of London in 1940 led her mother to evacuate with her children to Canada and then America. There, the adolescent Angela played bit parts, and developed a cabaret act of Noël Coward songs. Aged 17, she met John Van Druten, at a party thrown by her mother, who had written the screenplay for Gaslight. Cast in that on his recommendation, she was signed to a seven-year contract with MGM.
Despite Oscar nominations for both Gaslight and her next film, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lansbury never quite achieved the Hollywood career that seemed promised. This was partly because her strongest cinematic performance – as the manipulative mother of a presidential assassin in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate – had restricted distribution for a long time, due to concern that the plot had prophesied the murder of President John F Kennedy in 1963.
But Hollywood disappointment was soon balanced by Broadway fame. In 1966, Lansbury was an unexpected casting for the musical Mame, in the lead role of an eccentric socialite during the Depression. She received doting notices, and her first Tony award, although, in another setback, the title role in the 1974 movie of Mame was given, to rude reviews, by Lucille Ball.
However, Lansbury went on to play assorted Sondheim divas in revivals of Gypsy and A Little Night Music, and creating the role of the cannibalistic pie-maker, Mrs Lovett, in Sweeney Todd (1979), for which she drew on childhood memories to assume a plausible cockney accent.
Next Lansbury conquered a third performing art, in Murder, She Wrote (1984-96), which became, and remains, one of the most popular TV shows ever, playing Jessica Fletcher, a novelist-detective.
Network concern about having a woman of almost 60 leading a primetime show may be the reason that, in the opening moments of the first episode, Lansbury was seen first energetically cycling, and then running full pelt to answer a phone.
In the series launch, The Murder of Sherlock Holmes, Mrs Fletcher, a widowed journalist, while volunteering at a local theatre in her New England home town of Cabot Cove, watches a few moments of rehearsal for a whodunnit, in which she immediately identifies the killer.
In the next scene, she learns that a nephew has secretly given a publisher the mystery novel she has written as a hobby. Her career as best-selling crime writer JB Fletcher is launched, with a sideline as an amateur sleuth, solving murders that occur near her home, or in other locations (New York, Los Angeles, Hawaii) to which she has gone on book tours, or speaking engagements.
Fletcher is essentially a combination of two Agatha Christie characters: Miss Marple, the rural busybody who is better at detection than the clueless local cops – a role Lansbury had played in a 1980 Christie-based movie, The Mirror Crack’d – and Ariadne Oliver, a mystery novelist who uses her plotting skills to solve real-life cases.
The casting was another piece of professional fortune that punctuated Lansbury’s career: another admired long-timer, Jean Stapleton, was offered the part first but turned it down. Lansbury made the role a perfect vehicle for the amiable intelligence and sweet mischievousness that were the central ingredients of her performing personality. For the part, she lightly Americanised an accent that remained audibly English off-screen throughout her life.
Murder, She Wrote became something of a family business, with Lansbury’s second husband, Peter Shaw, and their son, Anthony, producing or directing many episodes. The draconian schedule of a US TV hit led Lansbury to reduce her own involvement at times – Jessica only appeared in the prologue and epilogue of some shows – but she was unhappy when the show was cancelled in 1996, seemingly because it was now seen as too cosy and too old, with the star having passed the age of 70.
Cheekily, the valedictory 264th episode was called Death by Demographics, finding Mrs Fletcher coming to the aid of a veteran radio books show host replaced by an uncouth shock jock.
There were four spin-off TV movies of Murder, She Wrote, and the show has had a lucrative afterlife in syndication and repeats. As TV demographics became more democratic, the prominence of an older female lead came to be seen as an advantage rather than an obstacle. Lansbury made various attempts to bring the show back, but these came to nothing.
In 2014, at the age of 88, Lansbury appeared on the London stage for the last time, as Madame Arcati, the dotty clairvoyant in a revival of Noël Coward’s 1941 comedy, Blithe Spirit.
The production – perhaps the last to feature a performer who had been a star in Coward’s own era – was at the Gielgud Theatre on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue. The venue brought great sentimental pleasure to Lansbury because it was where Moyna Macgill had made her London acting debut in 1915. Perhaps appropriately, as the play was about seances, Lansbury told an interviewer that she felt her mother’s presence in the building.
In 2015, Michael Blakemore, her director in Blithe Spirit, admiringly told the Guardian in a piece to mark the actor turning 90: “I think people such as her, who have been acting since they were teenagers, develop special gifts because they learn the basis of their craft when they are young and impressionable. She’s incredibly disciplined. Keeps herself very physically fit.”
On the day she became a nonagenarian, Lansbury was interviewed on US TV, and walked on to a Broadway stage to receive the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre.
Remarkably, she announced plans to return to Broadway in the 2017 season, in a revival of Enid Bagnold’s 1955 play The Chalk Garden. It amused Lansbury that she was a rare actor who would need to ‘age down’ to play the elderly matriarch, Mrs St Maugham.
However, she subsequently had doubts about sustaining the stamina to play eight performances a week. As a consolation, she took part in a one-night staged reading of The Chalk Garden at the playhouse of Hunter University, marking her last New York stage performance at the age of 91.
In the same year, she embodied, with typical precision, the contradictory harshness and charm of Aunt March in a UK-US adaptation of Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women.
That classic American role felt an ideal farewell to television in everything except its title: Angela Lansbury was indisputably one of the biggest women of American theatre and screen.
